Hi folks, long time lurker first time poster but I’d really love some objective advice from strangers, as weird as that may sound. I will try to keep this as brief as possible but there’s a lot of background so please bear with me.
My husband and I have been married for 8 years. He’s always been a drinker - we both are, we always enjoyed getting drinks and doing social things involving alcohol. But in the past couple of years he started drinking more and more, to the point where at the beginning of this year we had a talk and he agreed to go to rehab. I took him to rehab but at that point he was in such bad shape he ended up in the ICU - his liver had shut down, and multiple doctors were telling me that we may be looking at a transplant in his future.
His recovery has been long and hard - he lost his job after he came back from medical leave, and it’s been a struggle to get him to work on himself. He went to a few AA meetings and therapy sessions, and I got him to go to couple’s therapy with me for a while until our therapist retired. But since he got another job he’s been working a ton and he completely stopped going to any of that. I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t think of himself as an alcoholic, just as someone who got into a bad place but is “past it” now. I’ve tried to push him gently towards these things but I admittedly really struggle with communicating and he’s so good at passive resistance that I’ve just become exhausted.
A few weeks ago he had an MRI to see if he had any long-term damage to his liver, and found out that physically he has recovered 100%. It’s really unbelievable and he is just so incredibly lucky, to not only have survived but to have no long-term physical damage. He’s said himself he knows how lucky he is. He was literally on life support 8 months ago and now he’s lost 80 pounds, has a new and better job, and really does have a lot of potential.
I have told him multiple times that if he drinks again then I’m leaving. He’s brought it up (again because he doesn’t think he’s an alcoholic, so he would say things like how he wants to just have some wine or whatever) and so I was crystal clear with him that I would not go through this nightmare again. It was, unsurprisingly, incredibly traumatizing for me and we are dealing with a lot of medical bills as a result. That’s not something I’m going to do twice.
One of my friends got married this weekend and it was a big reunion with people I haven’t seen in a long time. We talked about it beforehand and I told him that I wanted to drink some, but we are all in our 30s so it wasn’t going to be anything crazy and there were also several of my other friends who weren’t drinking for various reasons, so while there was alcohol around it wasn’t this high-pressure environment full of peer pressure or people doing shots. He said it was fine. But I was still nervous because I knew he probably felt that because of his MRI results he’d be ok to drink again.
I was honestly tense for most of the wedding. At dinner he took a tiny sip of wine and I just stared at him but wasn’t going to make a scene. Other than that he was drinking mocktails as far as I know. We got back to the hotel and I went to bed because I was exhausted, but he went downstairs to hang out with some people who were still up. He was only gone for maybe 30 minutes.
Today one of my friends who was downstairs told me she had something to tell me and I knew exactly what she was going to say - she came downstairs and saw him with a beer. He put it down when he saw her. And today when I’d asked him how his night was he mentioned other people had beer but definitely made an effort to make it sound like it was other people drinking, not him.
He’s flying home today while I’m staying out here for work. I won’t see him for a few more days. And I know we need to talk but before we do I really just wanted to get some objective advice from people who don’t know either of us, because honestly I just feel overwhelmed and so, so tired. I’m not going to automatically move out or anything over one beer, but we are going to have a conversation where he needs to decide if he’s choosing me or he’s choosing drinking. That’s logical, right?
Compounding everything is the fact that I am non-confrontational to a fault, and neither of us are good communicators at all. We both know this and I’ve tried to get us to go to therapy (together and separately) but we just consistently fall back into our old habits. I also have a tendency to equivocate - well it’s just a beer, he does have strong willpower and maybe he CAN control it (I know this is not correct and I don’t want to fall into this trap) and I blame myself for things like not being a good communicator, not maybe being as good of a wife or whatever. It’s all bullshit I know but sometimes I can’t help it. It’s why I am here.
Objectively, him sneaking a beer is fucked up, right? He obviously knows he did something wrong because he put it down when my friend saw him and didn’t tell me about it. I told him I was not going to put up with him drinking again, so even one beer is reason enough for me to be upset, right? Also I know relapse rates are astronomical so him relapsing isn’t a shock - do I have a right to treat this as a dealbreaker? Honestly no one in my life has struggled with addiction before so this entire world is completely new to me. I feel like I’m learning as I go.
What would you do, if you were me?
TL;DR: my 8 months sober husband drank a beer at a wedding this weekend, after I told him we would not be staying together if he went back to drinking.
Submitted October 27, 2019 at 04:10PM by bananacrackers27 https://ift.tt/2BOTHZq
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